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In computer parlance, a clone is Company B’s copycat version of Company A’s computer that strains to be as software and hardware compatible with its inspiration as possible. For a platform to make an attractive target for cloning, it needs to meet a few criteria. The inspiration needs to be simple and/or well-documented enough that it’s practical for another company — and generally a smaller company at that, with far fewer resources at its disposal — to create a compatible knock-off in the first place. Then the inspiration needs to be successful enough that it’s spawned an attractive ecosystem that lots of people want to be a part of. And finally, there needs to be something preventing said people from joining said ecosystem by, you know, simply buying the machine that’s about to be cloned. Perhaps Company A, believing it has a lock on the market, keeps the price above what many otherwise interested people are willing or able to pay; perhaps Company A has simply neglected to do business in a certain part of the world filled with eager would-be buyers.

Clones have been with us almost from the moment that the trinity of 1977 kicked off the PC revolution in earnest. The TRS-80 was the big early winner of the trio thanks to its relatively low price and wide distribution through thousands of Radio Shack stores, outselling the Apple II in its first months by margins of at least twenty to one (as for the Commodore PET, it was the Bigfoot of the three, occasionally glimpsed in its natural habitat of trade-show booths but never available in a form you could actually put your hands on until well into 1978). The first vibrant, non-business-focused commercial software market in history sprung up around the little Trash 80. Cobbled together on an extreme budget out of generic parts that were literally just lying around at Radio Shack — the “monitor,” for instance, was just a cheap Radio Shack television re-purposed for the role — the TRS-80 was eminently cloneable. Doing so didn’t make a whole lot of sense in North America, where Radio Shack’s volume manufacturing and distribution system would be hard advantages to overcome. But Radio Shack had virtually no presence outside of North America, where there were nevertheless plenty of enthusiasts eager to join the revolution.

A shindig for EACA distributors in Hong Kong. Shortly after this photo was taken, Eric Chung, third from right in front, would abscond with $10 million and that would be that for EACA.

The most prominent of the number of TRS-80 cloners that had sprung up by 1980 was a rather shady Hong Kong-based company called EACA, who made cheap clones for any region of the world with distributors willing to buy them. Their knock-offs popped up in Europe under the name “The Video Genie”; in Australasia as the “Dick Smith System 80,” distributed under the auspices of Dick Smith Electronics, the region’s closest equivalent to Radio Shack; even in North America as the “Personal Micro Computers PMC-80.” EACA ended in dramatic fashion in 1983 when founder Eric Chuang absconded to Taiwan with all of his company’s assets that he could liquify, $10 million worth, stuffed into his briefcase. He or his descendents are presumably still living the high life there today.

By the time of those events, the TRS-80’s heyday was already well past, its position as the most active and exciting PC platform long since having been assumed by the Apple II, which had begun a surge to the fore in the wake of the II Plus model of 1979. The Apple II was if anything an even more tempting target for cloners than the TRS-80. While Steve Wozniak’s hardware design is justly still remembered as a marvel of compact elegance, it was also built entirely from readily available parts, lacking the complex and difficult-to-duplicate custom chips of competitors like Atari and Commodore. Wozniak had also insisted that every last diode on the Apple II’s circuit board be meticulously documented for the benefit of hackers just like him. And Apple, then as now, maintained some of the highest profit margins in the industry, creating a huge opportunity for a lean-and-mean cloner to undercut them.

A Franklin Ace 1000 mixed and matched with a genuine Apple floppy drive.

Assorted poorly distributed Far Eastern knock-offs aside, the first really viable Apple II clone arrived in mid-1982 in the form of the Franklin Ace line. The most popular model, the Ace 1000, offered for about 25 percent less than a II Plus complete hardware and software compatibility while also having more memory as well as luxuries like a numeric keypad and upper- and lowercase letter input. The Ace terrified Apple. With the Apple III having turned into a disaster, Apple remained a one-platform company, completely dependent on continuing Apple II sales — and continuing high Apple II profit margins — to fund not one but two hugely ambitious, hugely innovative, and hugely expensive new platform initiatives, Lisa and Macintosh. A viable market in Apple II workalikes which cut seriously into sales, or that forced price cuts, could bring everything down around their ears. Already six months before the Ace actually hit the market, as soon as they got word of Franklin’s plans, Apple’s lawyers were therefore looking for a way to challenge Franklin in court and drive their machine from the market.

As it turned out, the basis for a legal challenge wasn’t hard to find. Yes, the Apple II’s unexceptional hardware would seem to be fair game — but the machine’s systems software was not. Apple quickly confirmed that, like most of the TRS-80 cloners, Franklin had simply copied the contents of the II’s ROM chips; even bugs and the secret messages Apple’s programmers had hidden inside them were still there in Franklin’s versions. A triumphant Apple rushed to federal court to seek a preliminary injunction to keep the Ace off the market until the matter was decided through a trial. Much to their shocked dismay, the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania found the defense offered by Franklin’s legal team compelling enough to deny the injuction. The Ace came out right on schedule that summer of 1982, to good reviews and excellent sales.

Franklin’s defense sounds almost unbelievable today. They readily admitted that they had simply copied the contents of the ROM chips. They insisted, however, that the binary code contained on the chips, being a machine-generated sequence of 1s and 0s that existed only inside the chips and that couldn’t be reasonably read by a human, was not a form of creative expression and thus not eligible for copyright protection in the first place. In Franklin’s formulation, only the human-readable source code used to create the binary code stored on the ROM chips, which Franklin had no access to and no need for given that they had the binary code, was copyrightable. It was an audacious defense to say the least, one which if accepted would tear down the legal basis for the entire software industry. After all, how long would it take someone to leap to the conclusion that some hot new game, stored only in non-human-readable form on a floppy disk, was also ineligible for copyright protection? Astonishingly, when the case got back to the District Court for a proper trial the judge again sided with Franklin, stating that “there is some doubt as to the copyrightability of the programs described in this litigation,” in spite of an earlier case, Williams Electronics, Inc. v. Arctic International, Inc., which quite clearly had established binary code as copyrightable. Only in August of 1983 was the lower court’s ruling overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. A truculent Franklin threatened to appeal to the Supreme Court, but finally agreed to a settlement that January that demanded they start using their own ROMs if they wanted to keep cloning Apple IIs.

Apple Computer, Inc., v. Franklin Computer Corp. still stands today as a landmark in technology jurisprudence. It firmly and finally established the copyrightable status of software regardless of its form of distribution. And it of course also had an immediate impact on would-be cloners, making their lives much more difficult than before. With everyone now perfectly clear on what was and wasn’t legal, attorney David Grais clarified the process cloners would need to follow to avoid lawsuits in an episode of Computer Chronicles:

You have to have one person prepare a specification of what the program [the systems software] is supposed to do, and have another person who’s never seen the [original] program write a program to do it. If you can persuade a judge that the second fellow didn’t copy from the [original] code, then I think you’ll be pretty safe.

After going through this process, Apple II cloners needed to end up with systems software that behaved absolutely identically to the original. Every system call needed to take the exact same amount of time that it did on a real Apple II; each of the original software’s various little quirks and bugs needed to be meticulously duplicated. Anything less would bring with it incompatibility, because there was absolutely nothing in those ROMs that some enterprising hacker hadn’t used in some crazy, undocumented, unexpected way. This was a tall hurdle indeed, one which neither Franklin nor any other Apple II cloner was ever able to completely clear. New Franklins duly debuted with the new, legal ROMs, and duly proved to be much less compatible and thus much less desirable than the older models. Franklin left the Apple-cloning business within a few years in favor of hand-held dictionaries and thesauri.

There is, however, still another platform to consider, one on which the cloners would be markedly more successful: the IBM PC. The open or (better said) modular architecture of the IBM PC was not, as so many popular histories have claimed, a sign of a panicked or slapdash design process. It was rather simply the way that IBM did business. Back in the 1960s the company had revolutionized the world of mainframe computing with the IBM System/360, not a single computer model but a whole extended family of hardware and software designed to plug and play together in whatever combination best suited a customer’s needs. It was this product line, the most successful in IBM’s history, that propelled them to the position of absolute dominance of big corporate computing that they still enjoyed in the 1980s, and that reduced formerly proud competitors to playing within the house IBM had built by becoming humble “Plug-Compatible Manufacturers” selling peripherals that IBM hadn’t deigned to provide — or, just as frequently, selling clones of IBM’s products for lower prices. Still, the combined profits of all the cloners remained always far less than those of IBM itself; it seemed that lots of businesses wanted the security that IBM’s stellar reputation guaranteed, and were willing to pay a bit extra for it. IBM may have thought the PC market would play out the same way. If so, they were in for a rude surprise.

The IBM PC was also envisioned as not so much a computer as the cornerstone of an ever-evolving, interoperable computing family that could live for years or decades. Within three years of the original machine’s launch, you could already choose from two CPUs, the original Intel 8088 or the new 80286; could install as little as 16 K of memory or as much as 640 K; could choose among four different display cards, from the text-only Monochrome Display Adapter to the complicated and expensive CAD-oriented Professional Graphics Controller; could choose from a huge variety of other peripherals: floppy and hard disks, tape backup units, modems, printer interfaces, etc. The unifying common denominator amongst all this was a common operating system, MS-DOS, which had quickly established itself as the only one of the four operating paradigms supported by the original IBM PC that anyone actually used. Here we do see a key difference between the System/360 and the IBM PC, one destined to cause IBM much chagrin: whereas the former ran an in-house-developed IBM operating system, the operating system of the latter belonged to Microsoft.

The IBM architecture was different from that of the Apple II in that its operating system resided on disk, to be booted into memory at system startup, rather than being housed in ROM. Still, every computer needs to have some code in ROM. On an IBM PC, this code was known as the “Basic Input/Output System,” or BIOS, a nomenclature borrowed from the CP/M-based machines that preceded it. The BIOS was responsible on startup for doing some self-checks and configuration and booting the operating system from disk. It also contained a set of very basic, very low-level routines to do things like read from and write to the disks, detect keyboard input, or display text on the screen; these would be called constantly by MS-DOS and, very commonly, by applications as well while the machine was in operation. The BIOS was the one piece of software for the IBM PC that IBM themselves had written and owned, and for obvious reasons they weren’t inclined to share it with anyone else. Two small companies, Corona Labs and Eagle Computer, would simply copy IBM’s BIOS a la Franklin. It took the larger company all of one day to file suit and force complete capitulation and market withdrawal when those machines came to their attention in early 1984.

Long before those events, other wiser would-be cloners recognized that creating a workalike, “clean-room” version of IBM’s BIOS would be the key to executing a legal IBM clone. The IBM PC’s emphasis on modularity and future expansion meant that it was a bit more forgiving in this area than the likes of the more tightly integrated Apple II. Yet an IBM-compatible BIOS would still be a tricky business, fraught with technical and financial risk.

As the IBM PC was beginning to ship, a trio of Texas Instruments executives named Rod Canion, James Harris, and William Murto were kicking around ideas for getting out from under what they saw as a growing culture of non-innovation inside TI. Eager to start a business of their own, they considered everything from a Mexican restaurant to household gadgets like a beeper for finding lost keys. Eventually they started to ask what the people around them at TI wanted but weren’t getting in their professional lives. They soon had their answer: a usable portable computer that executives and engineers could cart around with them on the road, and that was cheap enough that their purchasing managers wouldn’t balk. Other companies had explored this realm before, most notably the brief-lived Osborne Computer with the Osborne 1, but those products had fallen down badly in the usability sweepstakes; the Osborne 1, for example, had a 5-inch display screen the mere thought of which could prompt severe eye strain in those with any experience with the machine, disk drives that could store all of 91 K, and just 64 K of memory. Importantly, all of those older portables ran CP/M, until now the standard for business computing. Canion, Harris, and Murto guessed, correctly, that CP/M’s days were numbered in the wake of IBM’s adoption of MS-DOS. Not wanting to be tied to a dying operating system, they first considered making their own. Yet when they polled the big software publishers about their interest in developing for yet another new, incompatible machine the results were not encouraging. There was only one thing for it: they must find a way to make their portable compatible with the IBM PC. If they could bring out such a machine before IBM did, the spoils could be enormous. Prominent tech venture capitalist Ben Rosen agreed, investing $2.5 million to help found Compaq Computer Corporation in February of 1982. What with solid funding and their own connections within the industry, Canion, Harris, and Murto thought they could easily design a hardware-compatible portable that was better than anything else available at the time. That just left the software side.

Given Bill Gates’s reputation as the Machiavelli of the computer industry, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that some journalists have credited him with anticipating the rise of PC clones from well before the release of the first IBM PC. That, however, is not the case. All indications are that Gates negotiated a deal that let Microsoft lease MS-DOS to IBM rather than sell it to them simply in the expectation that the IBM PC would be a big success, enough so that an ongoing licensing fee would amount to far more than a lump-sum payout in the long run. Thus he was as surprised as anyone when Compaq and a few other early would-be cloners contacted him to negotiate MS-DOS license deals for their own machines. Of course, Gates being Gates, it took him all of about ten minutes to grasp the implications of what was being requested, and to start making deals that, not incidentally, actually paid considerably better than the one he’d already made with IBM.

The BIOS would be a tougher nut to crack, the beachhead on which this invasion of Big Blue’s turf would succeed or fail. Having quickly concluded that simply copying IBM’s ROMs wasn’t a wise option, Compaq hired a staff of fifteen programmers who would dedicate the months to come to creating a slavish imitation. Programmers with any familiarity at all with the IBM BIOS were known as “dirty,” and barred from working on the project. Instead of relying on IBM’s published BIOS specifications (which might very well be incorrect due to oversight or skulduggery), the team took the thirty biggest applications on the market and worked through them one at a time, analyzing each BIOS call each program made and figuring out through trial and error what response it needed to receive. The two trickiest programs, which would go on to become a sort of stress test for clone compatibility both inside and outside of Compaq, proved to be Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Before the end of the year, Compaq was previewing their new portable to press and public and working hard to set up a strong dealer network. For the latter task they indulged in a bit of headhunting: they hired away from IBM H. L. ”Sparky” Sparks, the man who had set up the IBM PC dealer network. Knowing all too well how dealers thought and what was most important to them, Sparks instituted a standard expected dealer markup of 36 percent, versus the 33 percent offered by IBM, thus giving them every reason to look hard at whether a Compaq might meet a customer’s needs just as well or better than a machine from Big Blue.

Compaq’s first computer, the Portable

Savvy business realpolitik like that became a hallmark of Compaq. Previously clones had been the purview of small upstarts, often with a distinct air of the fly-by-night about them. The suburban-Houston-based Compaq, though, was different, not only from other cloners but also from the established companies of Silicon Valley. Compaq was older, more conservative, interested in changing the world only to the extent that that meant more Compaq computers on desks and in airplane luggage racks. ”I don’t think you could get a 20-year-old to not try to satisfy his ego by ‘improving’ on IBM,” said J. Steven Flannigan, the man who led the BIOS reverse-engineering effort. “When you’re fat, balding, and 40, and have a lot of patents already, you don’t have to try.” That attitude was something corporate purchasing managers could understand. Indeed, Compaq bore with it quite a lot of the same sense of comforting stolidity as did IBM itself. Not quite the first to hit the market with an IBM clone with a “clean” BIOS (that honor likely belongs to Columbia Data Products, a much scruffier sort of operation that would be out of business by 1985), Compaq nevertheless legitimized the notion in the eyes of corporate America.

The worst possible 1980s airplane seatmate: a business traveler lugging along a Compaq Portable.

Yet the Compaq Portable that started shipping very early in 1983 also succeeded because it was an excellent and — Flannigan’s sentiments aside — innovative product. By coming out with their portable before IBM itself, Compaq showed that clones need not be mere slavish imitations of their inspirations distinguished only by a lower price. “Portable” in 1983 did not, mind you, mean what it does today. The Compaq Portable was bigger and heavier — a full 28 pounds — than most desktop machines of today, something you manhandled around like a suitcase rather than slipping into a pocket or backpack. There wasn’t even a battery in the thing, meaning the businessperson on the go would likely be doing her “portable” computing only in her hotel room. Still, it was very thoughtfully designed within the technical constraints of its era; you could for instance attach it to a real monitor at your desk to enjoy color graphics in lieu of the little 9-inch monochrome screen that came built-in, a first step on the road to the ubiquitous laptop docking stations of today.

Launching fortuitously just as some manufacturing snafus and unexpected demand for the new PC/XT were making IBM’s own computers hard to secure in some places, the Compaq Portable took off like a rocket. Compaq sold 53,000 of them for $111 million in sales that first year, a record for a technology startup. IBM, suddenly in the unaccustomed position of playing catch-up, released their own portable the following year with fewer features but — and this was truly shocking — a lower price than the Compaq Portable; by forcing high-and-mighty IBM to compete on price, Compaq seemed to have somehow turned the world on its head. The IBM Portable PC was a notable commercial failure, first sign of IBM’s loosening grip on the monster they had birthed. Meanwhile Compaq launched their own head-to-head challenge that same year with the DeskPro line of desktop machines, to much greater success. Apple may have been attacking IBM in melodramatic propaganda films and declaring themselves and IBM to be locked in a battle of Good versus Evil, but IBM hardly seemed to notice the would-be Apple freedom fighters. The only company that really mattered to IBM, the only company that scared them, wasn’t sexy Apple but buttoned-down, square-jawed Compaq.

But Compaq was actually far from IBM’s only problem. Cloning just kept getting easier, for everyone. In the spring of 1984 two little companies called Award Software and Phoenix Technologies announced identical products almost simultaneously: a reverse-engineered, completely legal IBM-compatible BIOS which they would license to anyone who felt like using it to make a clone. Plenty of companies did, catapulting Award and Phoenix to the top of what was soon a booming niche industry (they would eventually resolve their rivalry the way that civilized businesspeople do it, by merging). With the one significant difficulty of cloning thus removed, making a new clone became almost a triviality, a matter of ordering up a handful of components along with MS-DOS and an off-the-shelf BIOS, slapping it all together, and shoving it out the door; the ambitious hobbyist could even do it in her home if she liked. By 1986, considerably more clones were being sold than IBMs, whose own sales were stagnant or even decreasing.

That year Intel started producing the 80386, the third generation of the line of CPUs that powered the IBM PC and its clones. IBM elected to wait a bit before making use of it, judging that the second-generation 80286, which they had incorporated into the very successful PC/AT in 1984, was still plenty powerful for the time being. It was a bad decision, predicated on a degree dominance which IBM no longer enjoyed. Smelling opportunity, Compaq made their own 80386-based machine, the DeskPro 386, the first to sport the hot new chip. Prior to this machine, the cloners had always been content to let IBM pave the way of such fundamental advances. The DeskPro 386 marks Compaq’s — and the clone industry’s — coming of age. No longer just floating along in the wake of IBM, tinkering with form factors, prices, and feature sets, now they were driving events. Already in November of 1985, Bill Machrone of PC Magazine had seen where this was leading: “Now that it [IBM] has created the market, the market doesn’t necessarily need IBM for the machines.” We see here business computing going through its second fundamental shift (the first being the transition from CP/M to MS-DOS). What was an ecosystem of IBM and IBM clones now became a set of sometimes less-than-ideal, sometimes accidental, but nevertheless agreed-upon standards that were bigger than IBM or anyone else. IBM, Machrone wrote, “had better conform” to the standards or face the consequences just like anyone else. Tellingly, it’s at about this time that we see the phrase “IBM clone” begin to fade, to be replaced by “MS-DOS machine” or “Intel-based machine.”

The emerging Microsoft/Intel juggernaut (note the lack of an “IBM” in there) would eventually conquer the home as well. Already by the mid-1980s certain specimens of the breed were beginning to manifest features that could make them attractive for the home user. Let’s rewind just slightly to look at the most important of them, which I’ve mentioned in a couple of earlier articles but have never really given its full due.

When the folks at Radio Shack, trying to figure out what to do with their aging, fading TRS-80 line, saw the ill-fated IBM PCjr, they saw things well worth salvaging in its 16-color graphics chip and its three-voice sound synthesizer, both far superior to the versions found in its big brothers. Why not clone those pieces, package them into an otherwise fairly conventional PC clone, and sell the end result as the perfect all-around computer, one which could run all the critical business applications but could also play games in the style to which kids with Commodore 64s were accustomed? Thanks to the hype that had accompanied the PCjr’s launch, there were plenty of publishers out there with huge inventories of games and other software that supported the PCjr’s audiovisuals, inventories they’d be only too eager to unload on Radio Shack cheap. With those titles to prime the pump, who knew where things might go…

Launched in late 1984, the Tandy 1000 was the first IBM clone to be clearly pitched not so much at business as at the ordinary consumer. In addition to the audiovisual enhancements and very aggressive pricing, it included DeskMate, a sort of proto-GUI operating environment designed to insulate the user from the cryptic MS-DOS command prompt while giving access to six typical home applications that came built right in. A brilliant little idea all the way around, the Tandy 1000 rescued Radio Shack from the brink of computing irrelevance. It also proved a godsend for many software publishers who’d bet big on the PCjr; John Williams credits it with literally saving Sierra by providing a market for King’s Quest, a game Sierra had developed for the PCjr at horrendous expense and to underwhelming sales given that platform’s commercial failure. Indeed, the Tandy 1000 became so popular that it prompted lots of game publishers to have a second look at the heretofore dull beige world of the clones. As they jumped aboard the MS-DOS gravy train, many made sure to take advantage of the Tandy 1000’s audiovisual enhancements. Thousands of titles would eventually blurb what became known as “Tandy graphics support” on their boxes and advertisements. Having secured the business market, the Intel/Microsoft architecture’s longer, more twisting road to hegemony over home computing began in earnest with the Tandy 1000. And meanwhile poor IBM couldn’t even get proper credit for the graphics standard they’d actually invented. Sometimes you just can’t win for losing.

Another sign of the nascent but inexorably growing power of Intel/Microsoft in the home would come soon after the Tandy 1000, with the arrival of the first game to make many Apple, Atari, and Commodore owners wish that they had a Tandy 1000 or, indeed, even one of its less colorful relatives. We’ll get to that soon — no, really! — but first we have just one more detour to take.

(I was spoiled for choice on sources this time. A quick rundown of periodicals: Creative Computing of January 1983; Byte of January 1983, November 1984, and August 1985; PC Magazine of January 1987; New York Times of November 5 1982, October 26 1983, January 5 1984, February 1 1984, and February 22 1984; Fortune of February 18 1985. Computer Wars by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris is a pretty book book-length study of IBM’s trials and tribulations during this period. More information on the EACA clones can be found at Terry Stewart’s site. More on Compaq’s roots in Houston can be found at the Texas Historical Association. A few more invaluable links are included in the article proper.)

If there was any one application that was the favorite amongst early boosters of personal computing, it was education. Indeed, it could sometimes be difficult to find one of those digital utopianists who was willing to prioritize anything else — unsurprisingly, given that so much early PC culture grew out of places like The People’s Computer Company, who made “knowledge is power” their de facto mantra and talked of teaching people about computers and using computers to teach with equal countercultural fervor. Creative Computing, the first monthly magazine dedicated to personal computing, grew out of that idealistic milieu, founded by an educational consultant who filled a big chunk of its pages with plans, schemes, and dreams for computers as tools for democratizing, improving, and just making schooling more fun. A few years later, when Apple started selling the II, they pushed it hard as the learning computer, making deals with the influential likes of the Minnesota Educational Consortium (MECC) of Oregon Trail fame that gave the machine a luster none of its competitors could touch. For much of the adult public, who may have had their first exposure to a PC when they visited a child’s classroom, the Apple II became synonymous with the PC, which was in turn almost synonymous with education in the days before IBM turned it into a business machine. We can still see the effect today: when journalists and advertisers look for an easy story of innovation to which to compare some new gadget, it’s always the Apple II they choose, not the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. And the iconic image of an Apple II in the public’s imagination remains a group of children gathered around it in a classroom.

For all that, though, most of the early educational software really wasn’t so compelling. The works of Edu-Ware, the first publisher to make education their main focus, were fairly typical. Most were created or co-created by Edu-Ware co-founder Sherwin Steffin, who brought with him a professional background of more than twenty years in education and education theory. He carefully outlined his philosophy of computerized instruction, backed as it was by all the latest research into the psychology of learning, in long-winded, somewhat pedantic essays for Softalk and Softline magazines, standard bearers of the burgeoning Apple II community. Steffin’s software may or may not have correctly applied the latest pedagogical research, but it mostly failed at making children want to learn with it. The programs were generally pretty boring exercises in drill and practice, lacking even proper titles. Fractions, Arithmetic Skills, or Compu-Read they said on their boxes, and fractions, arithmetic, or (compu-)reading was what you got, a series of dry drills to work through without a trace of wit, whimsy, or fun.

The other notable strand of early PC-based education was the incestuous practice of using the computer to teach kids about computers. The belief that being able to harness the power of the computer through BASIC would somehow become a force for social democratization and liberation is an old one, dating back to even before the first issues of Creative Computing — to the People’s Computer Club and, indeed, to the very researchers at Dartmouth University who created BASIC in the 1960s. As BASIC’s shortcomings became more and more evident, other instructional languages and courses based on them kept popping up in the early 1980s: PILOT, Logo, COMAL, etc. This craze for “computer literacy,” which all but insisted that every kid who didn’t learn to program was going to end up washing dishes or mowing lawns for a living, peaked along with the would-be home-computer revolution in about 1983. Advocating for programming as a universal life skill was like suggesting in 1908 that everyone needed to learn to take a car apart and put it back together to prepare for the new world that was about to arrive with the Model T — which, in an example of how some things never really change, was exactly what many people in 1908 were in fact suggesting. Joseph Weizenbaum of Eliza fame, always good for a sober corrective to the more ebullient dreams of his colleagues, offered a take on the real computerized future that was shockingly prescient by comparing the computer to the electric motor.

There are undoubtedly many more electric motors in the United States than there are people, and almost everybody owns a lot of electric motors without thinking about it. They are everywhere, in automobiles, food mixers, vacuum cleaners, even watches and pencil sharpeners. Yet, it doesn’t require any sort of electric-motor literacy to get on with the world, or, more importantly, to be able to use these gadgets.

Another important point about electric motors is that they’re invisible. If you question someone using a vacuum cleaner, of course they know that there is an electric motor inside. But nobody says, “Well, I think I’ll use an electric motor programmed to be a vacuum cleaner to vacuum the floor.”

The computer will also become largely invisible, as it already is to a large extent in the consumer market. I believe that the more pervasive the computer becomes, the more invisible it will become. We talk about it a lot now because it is new, but as we get used to the computer it will retreat into the background. How much hands-on computer experience will students need? The answer, of course, is not very much. The student and the practicing professional will operate special-purpose instruments that happen to have computers as components.

The pressure to make of every kid a programmer gradually faded as the 1980s wore on, leaving programming to those of us who found it genuinely fascinating. Today even the term “computer literacy,” always a strange linguistic choice anyway, feels more and more like a relic of history as this once-disruptive and scary new force has become as everyday as, well, the electric motor.

As for those other educational programs, they — at least some of them — got better by mid-decade. Programs like Number Munchers, Math Blaster, and Reader Rabbit added a bit more audiovisual sugar to their educational vegetables along with a more gamelike framework to their repetitive drills, and proved better able to hold children’s interest. For all the early rhetoric about computers and education, one could argue that the real golden age of the Apple II as an educational computer didn’t begin until about 1983 or 1984.

By that time a new category of educational software, partly a marketing construct but partly a genuinely new thing, was becoming more and more prominent: edutainment. Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, has often claimed to have invented the portmanteau for EA’s 1984 title Seven Cities of Gold, but this is incorrect; a company called Milliken Publishing was already using the label for their programs for the Atari 8-bit line in late 1982, and it was already passing into common usage by the end of 1983. Edutainment dispensed with the old drill-and-practice model in preference to more open, playful forms of interactions that nevertheless promised, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to teach. The skills they taught, meanwhile, were generally not the rigid, disembodied stuff of standardized tests but rather embedded organically into living virtual worlds. It’s all but impossible to name any particular game as the definitive first example of such a nebulous genre, but a good starting point might be Tom Snyder and Spinnaker Software.

Tom Snyder, 1984

Snyder had himself barely made it through high school. He came to blame his own failings as a student on his inability to relate to exactly the notions of arbitrary, contextless education that marked the early era of PC educational software: “Here, learn this set of facts. Write this paper. This is what you must know. This is what’s important.” When he became a fifth-grade teacher years later, he made it a point to ground his lessons always in the real world, to tell his students why it was useful to know the things he taught them and how it all related to the world around them. He often used self-designed games, first done with pencil and paper and cardboard and later done on computers, to let his students explore knowledge and its ramifications. In 1980 he founded a groundbreaking development company, Tom Snyder Productions, to commercialize some of those efforts. One of them became Snooper Troops, published as one of Spinnaker’s first titles in 1982; it had kids wandering around a small town trying to solve a mystery by compiling clues and using their powers of deduction. The next year’s In Search of the Most Amazing Thing, still a beloved memory of many of those who played it, combined clue-gathering with elements of economics and even diplomacy in a vast open world. Unlike so much other children’s software, Snyder’s games never talked down to their audience; children are after all just as capable of sensing when they’re being condescended to as anyone else. They differed most dramatically from the drill-and-practice software that preceded them in always making the educational elements an organic part of their worlds. One of Snyder’s favorite mantras applies to educational software as much as it does to any other creative endeavor and, indeed, to life: “Don’t be boring.” The many games of Tom Snyder Productions, most of which were not actually designed by Snyder himself, were often crude and slow, written as often as not in BASIC. But, at least at the conceptual level, they were seldom boring.

It’s of course true that a plain old game that requires a degree of thoughtfulness and a full-on work of edutainment can be very hard to disentangle from one another. Like so much else in life, the boundaries here can be nebulous at best, and often had as much to do with marketing, with the way a title was positioned by its owner, as with any intrinsic qualities of the title itself. When we go looking for those intrinsics, we can come up with only a grab bag of qualities of which any given edutainment title was likely to share a subset: being based on real history or being a simulation of some real aspect of science or technology; being relatively nonviolent; emphasizing thinking and logical problem-solving rather than fast reflexes. Like pornography, edutainment is something that many people seemed to just know when they saw it.

That said, there were plenty of titles that straddled the border between entertainment and edutainment. Spinnaker’s Telarium line of adventure games is a good example. Text-based games that were themselves based on books, published by a company that had heretofore specialized in education and edutainment… it wasn’t hard to grasp why parents might be expected to find them appealing, even if they were never explicitly marketed as anything other than games. Spinnaker’s other line of adventures, Windham Classics, blurred the lines even more by being based on acknowledged literary classics of the sort kids might be assigned to read in school rather than popular science fiction and fantasy, and by being directly pitched at adolescents of about ten to fourteen years of age. Tellingly, Tom Synder Productions wrote one of the Windham Classics games; Dale Disharoon, previously a developer of Spinnaker educational software like Alphabet Zoo, wrote twomore.

A certain amount of edutational luster clung to the text adventure in general, was implicit in much of the talk about interactive fiction as a new form of literature that was so prevalent during the brief bookware boom. One could even say it clung to the home computer itself, in the form of notions about “good screens” and “bad screens.” The family television was the bad screen, locus of those passive and mindless broadcasts that have set parents and educators fretting almost from the moment the medium was invented, and now the home of videogames, the popularity of which caused a reactionary near-hysteria in some circles; they would inure children to violence (if they thought Space Invaders was bad, imagine what they’d say about the games of today!) and almost literally rot their brains, making of them mindless slack-jawed zombies. The computer monitor, on the other hand, was the good screen, home of more thoughtful and creative forms of interaction and entertainment. What parent wouldn’t prefer to see her kid playing, say, Project: Space Station rather than Space Invaders? Home-computer makers and software publishers — at least the ones who weren’t making Space Invaders clones — caught on to this dynamic early and rode it hard.

As toy manufacturers had realized decades before, there are essentially two ways to market children’s entertainment. One way is to appeal to the children themselves, to make them want your product and nag Mom and Dad until they relent. The other is to appeal directly to Mom and Dad, to convince them that what you’re offering will be an improving experience for their child, perhaps with a few well-placed innuendoes if you can manage them about how said child will be left behind if she doesn’t have your product. With that in mind, it can be an interesting experiment to look at the box copy from software of the early home-computer era whilst asking yourself whether it’s written for the kids who were most likely to play it or the parents who were most likely to pay for it — or whether it hedges its bets by offering a little for both. Whatever else it was, emphasizing the educational qualities of your game was just good marketing; a 1984 survey found that 46 percent of computers in homes had been purchased by parents with the primary goal of improving their children’s education. It was the perfect market for the title that would come to stand alongside The Oregon Trail as one of the two classic examples of 1980s edutainment software.

Doug, Cathy, and Gary Carlston, 1983

The origins of the game that would become known as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? are confused, with lots of oft-contradictory memories and claims flying around. However, the most consistent story has it beginning with an idea by Gary Carlston of Brøderbund Software in 1983. He and his brother Doug had been fascinated by their family’s almanac as children: “We used to lie there and ask each other questions out of the almanac.” This evolved into impromptu quiz games in bed after the lights went out. Gary now proposed a game or, better yet, a series of games which would have players running down a series of clues about geography and history, answerable via a trusty almanac or other reference work to be included along with the game disk right there in the box.

Brøderbund didn’t actually develop much software in-house, preferring to publish the work of outside developers on a contract basis. While they did have a small staff of programmers and even artists, they were there mainly to assist outside developers by helping with difficult technical problems, porting code to other machines, and polishing in-game art rather than working up projects from scratch. But this idea just seemed to have too much potential to ignore or outsource. Gary was therefore soon installed in Brøderbund’s “rubber room” — so-called because it was the place where people went to bounce ideas off one another — along with Lauren Elliott, the company’s only salaried game designer; Gene Portwood, Elliott’s best friend, manager of Brøderbund’s programming team, and a pretty good artist; Ed Bernstein, head of Brøderbund’s art department; and programmer Dane Bigham, who would be expected to write not so much a game as a cross-platform database-driven engine that could power many ports and sequels beyond the Apple II original.

Gary’s first idea was to name the game Six Crowns of Henry VIII, and to make it a scavenger hunt for the eponymous crowns through Britain. However, the team soon turned that into something wider-scoped and more appealing to the emerging American edutainment market. You would be chasing an international criminal ring through cities located all over the world, trying to recover a series of stolen cultural artifacts, like a jade goddess from Singapore, an Inca mask from Peru, or a gargoyle from Notre Dame Cathedral (wonder how the thieves managed that one). It’s not entirely clear who came up with the idea for making the leader of the ring, whose capture would become the game’s ultimate goal, a woman named Carmen Sandiego, but Elliott believes the credit most likely belongs to Portwood. Regardless, everyone immediately liked the idea. “There were enough male bad guys,” said Elliott later, and “girls [could] be just as bad.” (Later, when the character became famous, Brøderbund would take some heat from Hispanic groups who claimed that the game associated a Hispanic surname with criminality. Gary replied with a tongue-in-cheek letter explaining that “Sandiego” was actually Carmen’s married name, that her maiden name was “Sondberg” and she was actually Swedish.) When development started in earnest, the Carmen team was pared down to a core trio of Eliott, who broadly speaking put together the game’s database of clues and cities; Portwood, who drew the graphics; and Bigham, who wrote the code. But, as Eliott later said, “A lot of what we did just happened. We didn’t think much about it.”

To play that first Carmen Sandiego game today can be just a bit of an underwhelming experience; there’s just not that much really to it. Each of a series of crimes and the clues that lead you to the perpetrator are randomly generated from the game’s database of 10 possible suspects, 30 cities, and 1000 or so clues. Starting in the home city of the stolen treasure in question, you have about five days to track down each suspect. Assuming you’re on the right track, you’ll get clues in each city as to the suspect’s next destination among the several possibilities represented by the airline connections from that city: perhaps he “wanted to know the price of tweed” or “wanted to sail on the Severn.” (Both of these clues would point you to Britain, more specifically to London.) If you make the right deductions each step of the way you’ll apprehend the suspect in plenty of time. You’ll know you’ve made the wrong choice if you wind up at a dead-end city with no further clues on offer. Your only choice then is to backtrack, wasting precious time in the process. The tenth and final suspect to track down is always Carmen Sandiego herself, who for all of her subsequent fame is barely characterized at all in this first installment. Capture her, and you retire to the “Detective Hall of Fame.” There’s a little bit more to it, like the way that you must also compile details of the suspect’s appearance as you travel so you can eventually fill out an arrest warrant, but not a whole lot. Any modern player with Wikipedia open in an adjacent window can easily finish all ten cases and win the game in a matter of a few hours at most. By the time you do, the game’s sharply limited arsenal of clues, cities, and stolen treasures is already starting to feel repetitive.

Which is not to say that Carmen Sandiego is entirely bereft of modern appeal. When my wife and I played it over the course of a few evenings recently, we learned a few interesting things we hadn’t known before and even discovered a new country that I at least had never realized existed: the microstate of San Marino, beloved by stamp and coin collectors and both the oldest and the smallest constitutional republic in the world. My wife is now determined that we should make a holiday there.

Still, properly appreciating Carmen Sandiego‘s contemporary appeal requires of us a little more work. The logical place to start is with that huge World Almanac and Books of Facts that made the game’s box the heaviest on the shelves. It can be a bit hard even for those of us old enough to have grown up before the World Wide Web to recover the mindset of an era before we had the world in our living rooms — or, better said in this age of mobile computing, in our pockets. Back in those days when you had to go to a library to do research, when your choices of recreation of an evening were between whatever shows the dozen or so television stations were showing and whatever books you had in the house, an almanac was magic to any kid with a healthy curiosity about the world and a little imagination, what with its thousand or more pages filled with exotic lands along with records of deeds, buildings, cities, people, animals, and geography whose very lack of context only made them more alluring. The whole world — and then some; there were star charts and the like for budding astronomers — seemed to have been stuffed within its covers.

In that spirit, one could almost call the Carmen Sandiego game disk ancillary to the almanac rather than the other way around. Who knew what you delights you might stumble over while you tried to figure out, say, in which country the python made its home? The World Almanaccontinues to come out every year, and seems to have done surprisingly well, all things considered, surviving the forces that have killed dead typical companions on reference shelves like the encyclopedia. But of course it’s lost much of its old magic in these days of information glut. While we can still recapture a little of the old feeling by playing Carmen Sandiego with a web browser open, our search engines have just gotten too good; it’s harder to stumble across the same sorts of crazy facts and alluring diversions.

Carmen Sandiego captured so many kids because it tempted them to discover knowledge for themselves rather than attempting to drill it into them, and all whilst never talking down to them. Gary Carlston said of Brøderbund’s edutainment philosophy, “If we would’ve enjoyed it at age 12, and if we still it enjoy it now, then it’s what we want. Whether it’s pedagogically correct is not relevant.” Carmen Sandiego did indeed attract criticism from earnest educational theorists armed with studies showing how it failed to live up to the latest research on learning; this low-level drumbeat of criticism continues to this day. Some of it may very well be correct and relevant; I’m hardly qualified to judge. What I do see, though, is that Carmen Sandiego offers a remarkably progressive view of knowledge and education for its time. At a time when schools were still teaching many subjects through rote memorization of facts and dates, when math courses were largely “take this set of numbers and manipulate them to become this other set of numbers” without ever explaining why, Carmen Sandiego grasped that success in the coming world of cheap and ubiquitous data would require not a head stuffed with facts but the ability to extract relevant information from the flood of information that surrounds us, to synthesize it into conclusions, and to apply it to a problem at hand. While drill-and-practice software taught kids to perform specific tasks, Carmen Sandiego, like all the best edutainment software, taught them how to think. Just as importantly, it taught them how much fun doing so could be.

Brøderbund may not have been all that concerned about making Carmen Sandiego “pedagogically correct,” but they were hardly blind to the game’s educational value, nor to the marketing potential therein. The back cover alone of Carmen Sandiego is a classic example of edutainment marketing, emphasizing the adventure aspects for the kids while also giving parents a picture of children beaming over an almanac and telling how they will be “introduced to world geography” — and all whilst carefully avoiding the E-word; telling any kid that something is “educational” was and is all but guaranteed to turn her off it completely.

For all that, though, the game proved to be a slow burner rather than an out-of-the-gates hit upon its release in late 1985. It was hardly a flop; sales were strong enough that Brøderbund released the first of many sequels, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, the following year. Yet year by year the game just got more popular, especially when Brøderbund started to reach out more seriously to educators, releasing special editions for schools and sending lots of free swag to those who agreed to host “Carmen Days,” for which students and teachers dressed up as Carmen or her henchmen or the detectives on their trail, and could call in to the “Acme Detective Agency” at Brøderbund itself to talk with Portwood or Elliott playing the role of “the Chief.” The combination of official school approval, the game’s natural appeal to both parents and children, and lots of savvy marketing proved to be a potent symbiosis indeed. Total sales of Carmen Sandiego games passed 1 million in 1989, 2 million in 1991, by which time the series included not only Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? but also Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in America’s Past is Carmen Sandiego?, and the strangely specific Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?, prototype for a proposed series of state-level games that never got any further; Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego? would soon go in the opposite direction, rounding out the original series of reference-work-based titles on a cosmic scale. In 1991 Carmen also became a full-fledged media star, the first to be spawned by a computer game, when Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? debuted as a children’s game show on PBS.

A Print Shop banner: an artifact as redolent of its era as Hula Hoops or bellbottoms are of theirs.

Through the early 1980s, Brøderbund had been a successful software publisher, but not outrageously so in comparison to their peers. At mid-decade, though, the company’s fortunes suddenly began to soar just as many of those peers were, shall we say, trending in the opposite direction. Brøderbund’s success was largely down to two breakout products which each succeeded in identifying a real, compelling use for home computers at a time when that was proving far more difficult than the boosters and venture capitalists had predicted. One was of course the Carmen Sandiego line. The other was a little something called The Print Shop, which let users design and print out signs and banners using a variety of fonts and clip art. How such a simple, straightforward application could become so beloved may seem hard to understand today, but beloved The Print Shop most definitely became. For the rest of the decade and beyond its distinctive banners, enabled by the fan-fold paper used by the dot-matrix printers of the day, could be seen everywhere that people without a budget for professional signage gathered: at church socials, at amateur sporting events, inside school hallways and classrooms. Like the first desktop-publishing programs that were appearing on the Macintosh contemporaneously, The Print Shop was one more way in which computers were beginning to democratize creative production, a process, as disruptive and fraught as it is inspiring, that’s still ongoing today.

In having struck two such chords with the public in the form of The Print Shop and Carmen Sandiego, Brøderbund was far ahead of virtually all of their competitors who failed to find even one. Brøderbund lived something of a charmed existence for years, defying most of the hard-won conventional wisdom about consumer software being a niche product at best and the real money being in business software. If the Carlstons hadn’t been so gosh-darn nice, one might be tempted to begrudge them their success. (Once when the Carlstons briefly considered a merger with Electronic Arts, whose internal culture was much more ruthless and competitive, a writer said it would be a case of the Walton family moving in with the Manson family.) One could almost say that for Brøderbund alone the promises of the home-computer revolution really did materialize, with consumers rushing to buy from them not just games but practical software as well. Tellingly — and assuming we agree to label Carmen Sandiego as an educational product rather than a game — Brøderbund’s top-selling title was never a game during any given year between 1985 and the arrival of the company’s juggernaut of an adventure game Myst in 1993, despite their publication of hits like the Jordan Mechner games Karateka and Prince of Persia. Carmen Sandiego averaged 25 to 30 percent of Brøderbund’s sales during those years, behind only The Print Shop. The two lines together accounted for well over half of yearly revenues that were pushing past $50 million by decade’s end — still puny by the standards of business software but very impressive indeed by that of consumer software.

For the larger software market, Carmen Sandiego — and, for that matter, The Print Shop — were signs that, if the home computer hadn’t quite taken off as expected, it also wasn’t going to disappear or be relegated strictly to the role of niche game machine either, a clear sign that there were or at least with a bit more technological ripening could be good reasons to own one. The same year that Brøderbund pushed into edutainment with Carmen Sandiego, MECC, who had reconstituted themselves as the for-profit (albeit still state-owned) publisher Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation in 1984, released the definitive, graphically enhanced version of that old chestnut The Oregon Trail, a title which shared with Carmen Sandiego an easygoing, progressive, experiential approach to learning. Together Oregon and Carmen became the twin icons of 1980s edutainment, still today an inescapable shared memory for virtually everyone who darkened a grade or middle school door in the United States between about 1985 and 1995.

The consequences of Carmen and Oregon and the many other programs they pulled along in their wake were particularly pronounced for the one remaining viable member of the old trinity of 1977: the Apple II. Lots of people both outside and inside Apple had been expecting the II market to finally collapse for several years already, but so far that had refused to happen. Apple, whose official corporate attitude toward the II had for some time now been vacillating between benevolent condescension and enlightened disinterest, did grant II loyalists some huge final favors now. One was the late 1986 release of the Apple IIGS, a radically updated version produced on a comparative shoestring by the company’s dwindling II engineering team with assistance from Steve Wozniak himself. The IIGS used a 16-bit Western Design Center 65C816 CPU that was capable of emulating the old 8-bit 6502 when necessary but was several times as powerful. Just as significantly, the older IIs’ antiquated graphics and sound were finally given a major overhaul that now made them amongst the best in the industry, just a tier or two below those of the current gold standard, Commodore’s new 68000-based Amiga. The IIGS turned out to be a significant if fairly brief-lived hit, outselling the Macintosh and all other II models by a considerable margin in its first year.

But arguably much more important for the Apple II’s long-term future was a series of special educational offers Apple made during 1986 and 1987. In January of the former year, they announced a rebate program wherein schools could send them old computers made by Apple or any of their competitors in return for substantial rebates on new Apple IIs. In April of that year, they announced major rebates for educators wishing to purchase Apple IIs for home use. Finally, in March of 1987, Apple created two somethings called the Apple Unified School System and the Apple Education Purchase Program, which together represented a major, institutionalized outreach and support effort designed to get even more Apple IIs into schools (and, not incidentally, more Macs into universities). The Apple II had been the school computer of choice virtually from the moment that schools started buying PCs at all, but these steps along with software like Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail cemented and further extended its dominance, to an extent that many schools and families simply refused to let go. The bread-and-butter Apple II model, the IIe, remained in production until November of 1993, by which time this sturdy old machine, thoroughly obsolete already by 1985, was selling almost exclusively to educators and Apple regarded its continued presence in their product catalogs like that of the faintly embarrassing old uncle who just keeps showing up for every Thanksgiving dinner.

Even after the inevitable if long-delayed passing of the Apple II as a fixture in schools, Carmen and Oregon lived on. Both received the requisite CD-ROM upgrades, although it’s perhaps debatable in both instances how much the new multimedia flash really added to the experience. The television Carmen Sandiego game shows also continued to air in various incarnation through the end of the decade. CarmenChoose Your Own Adventure-style gamebooks, conventional young-adult novels, comic books, and a board game were also soon on offer, along with yet more computerized creations like Carmen Sandiego Word Detective. Only with the millennium did Carmen — always a bit milquetoast as a character and hardly the real source of the original games’ appeal — along with The Oregon Trail see their stars finally start to fade. Both retain a certain commercial viability today, but more as kitschy artifacts and nostalgia magnets than serious endeavors in either learning or entertainment. Educational software has finally moved on.

Perhaps not enough, though: it remains about 10 percent inspired, 10 percent acceptable in a workmanlike way, and 80 percent boredom stemming sometimes from well-meaning cluelessness and sometimes from a cynical desire to exploit parents, teachers, and children. Those looking to enter this notoriously underachieving field today could do worse than to hearken back to the simple charms of Carmen Sandiego, created as it was without guile and without reams of pedagogical research to back it up, out of the simple conviction that geography could actually be fun. All learning can be fun. You just have to do it right.

(See Engineering Play by Mizuko Ito for a fairly thorough survey of educational and edutational software from an academic perspective. Gamers at Work by Morgan Ramsay has an interview with Doug and Gary Carlston which dwells on Carmen Sandiego at some length. Matt Waddell wrote a superb history of Carmen Sandiego for a class at Stanford University in 2001. A piece on Brøderbund on the eve of the first Carmen Sandiego game’s release was published in the September 1985 issue of MicroTimes. A summary of the state of Brøderbund circa mid-1991 appeared in the July 9, 1991, New York Times. Joseph Weizenbaum’s comments appeared in the July 1984 issue of Byte. The first use of the term “edutainment” that I could locate appeared in a Milliken Publishing advertisement in the January 1983 issue of Creative Computing. Articles involving Spinnaker and Tom Snyder appeared in the June 1984 Ahoy! and the October 1984 and December 1985 Compute!’s Gazette. And if you got through all that and would like to experience the original Apple II Carmen Sandiego for yourself, feel free to download the disk images and manual — but no almanac I’m afraid — from right here.)

The story of Shadowkeep, even more so than Amazon the odd duck in the Telarium lineup, begins with Sigma Distributing, one of the first big microcomputer hardware distributors in the Seattle area. In 1981 Christopher Anson, a Sigma vice president, sought and received permission to start a new subsidiary to develop original games to serve the growing demand for software for the computers Sigma was selling. Anson’s first two acts were to name the company Ultrasoft and hire a programmer named Alan Clark away from Boeing. Clark became the technical architect of the set of tools and approaches that would define Ultrasoft during their brief existence.

Anson had decided that the best place for Ultrasoft to make a splash was in the field of illustrated adventure games, a nexus of excitement in the wake of Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess. Like Scott Adams, Ken Williams, and Marc Blank before him, Clark realized that it would be more efficient in the long run to write an adventure-game engine and language that could give designers a bit of distance from the technical details of implementation as well as let Ultrasoft deploy their games to multiple platforms relatively painlessly. Deciding that a little corporate branding is always in order, they named their adventure programming language simply Ultra; the interpreter for each targeted platform UltraCode; their graphics system UltraVision. From the standpoint of the end user, Ultrasoft’s most obvious innovation — or, if you like, gimmick — involved this last. UltraVision could display not just static pictures but also brief animations, which could be used to, say, show the player’s avatar actually walking from room to room. Less obvious but no less significant, however, was the parser, one of the first developed outside of Infocom that allowed more than two words — although, it should be said, it was nowhere near as impressive a creation overall (more on that shortly).

Ultrasoft developed two adventures using the system, The Mask of the Sun (1982) and Serpent’s Star (1983). Both are interesting in their way, more carefully crafted, atmospheric, and thoughtful than was the norm of the time. Serpent’s Star in particular does a surprisingly good job of matching its puzzles to its theme of Buddhist philosophy. But both — and particularly Mask of the Sun — are also riddled with the sorts of unfair elements that were all too typical of their era. And both are fairly excruciating to play under any conditions. Whatever its other merits, you see, the Ultra system is slow. A quick look at the games’ technical underpinnings gives a clue as to why: the Ultra program logic doesn’t appear to be compiled at all, merely interpreted in place. The only blessing of that approach was that it enabled some frustrated adventurers to find the solutions to the more incomprehensible puzzles by code diving.

Ultrasoft first tried to market and distribute Mask of the Sun and Serpent’s Star on their own, but found it tough sledding for a tiny company with mainly regional connections in the professionalizing software industry of 1983. They soon accepted the role of developer only, licensing both games to Brøderbund for publication. After spending most of 1983 working on an ambitious new game, an adventure-game/CRPG hybrid called Shadowkeep written in a new version of their system which they dubbed Ultra II, they found a publisher for it in Spinnaker, who took the largely completed game as a future member of their planned Telarium line.

Looking to find some way to make the game fit with the bookware theme of the line as a whole, Spinnaker came up with the idea of reversing the usual process, of hiring a name writer to adapt the game into a book rather than the opposite. Luckily, they had substantial time to get the novelization done; they signed the contract with Ultrasoft in late 1983, a year before they planned to launch the Telarium line. Spinnaker approached Warner Books, who hooked them up with the reigning king of media tie-in novels, Alan Dean Foster. After making his reputation within the industry ghost-writing the Star Wars novelization for George Lucas, Foster had gone on to do The Black Hole, Clash of the Titans, The Last Starfighter, and Alien among many others. Virtually any big science-fiction or fantasy movie released seemed to arrive with an accompanying Alan Dean Foster novelization. (That’s still true today; his most recent novelization as of this writing is of Star Trek into Darkness.)

Spinnaker furnished Foster with design documents and a copy of the Shadowkeep source code and let him have at it. Those were all he had to go on; he doesn’t recall ever meeting or speaking with anyone from the design team, nor ever actually playing the game. He does, however, recall it as a very challenging project indeed. Being a party-based CRPG in the mold of Wizardry, Shadowkeep has no actual protagonist to speak of — no characters at all, really, outside of the fellow who sells you equipment and the evil demon Dal’Brad who shows up for the final showdown on the last of the dungeon levels. He was thus forced to invent the vast majority of the novel himself, whilst struggling to strike a balance between writing some recognizable analogue to the experience of the game and giving away all of its challenges. He did his usual workmanlike job, handing in a readable little genre exercise for simultaneous release with the game. Tellingly, it’s not until halfway through the book that the heroes enter the Shadowkeep — i.e., reach the beginning of the game.

Said game is… well, it’s really strange. Imagine Wizardry played with a text parser, and you’ve pretty well summed up Shadowkeep. You make a party of up to nine(!) characters. Most of the usual is here: attribute scores, classes and races to choose from, ever better equipment and spells to collect. Oddly missing, however, are character levels and any concept of experience; getting more powerful in this game is strictly a matter of finding or buying better stuff. The dungeon levels are the usual 16 X 16 grids full of traps, monsters, and assorted cartographic challenges. There are some original ideas here. For instance, the positions of the monsters that attack you and those of the members of your party are taken account of to a degree not found in Wizardry, adding some strategic depth to the experience. You likewise have more combat options than in Wizardry; in each round you can choose to forget defense and attack twice, or to just parry, or to attack once while not totally neglecting defense. And certainly the full-color graphics, which feature occasional examples of Ultrasoft’s trademark animations, are much better than Wizardry‘s wire frames.

Still, Shadowkeep mostly just makes you appreciate all the more how well Wizardry does the dungeon crawl. The game replaces Wizardry‘s hot-key interface with, yes, a text-adventure parser. You literally just type what you want to do: “OPEN DOOR,” “GET THE TORCH,” “CAST THE LUMINANCE SPELL,” “LIGHT THE TORCH AND PREPARE THE SWORD,” “PUT THE WAND OF TRAVEL IN THE CHEST.” Sounds fine, right? Well, what sounds fine in the abstract doesn’t work so well in practice. You must now type “F <RETURN>” (for “FORWARD”) instead of just “F” every time you want to walk forward a square in the dungeon. This may seem a minor thing, but consider that you’ll be entering this command thousands and thousands of times in the course of playing the game. That extra keystroke thus means thousands and thousands of extra keystrokes. And that’s the tip of the iceberg; this game is death by a hundred such small cuts. Commands by default are carried out by the leader of your party, who is not even a character you select but merely the one with the highest Leadership attribute score. Having someone else do something requires that you prepend her name to the command (“NAOMI GET THE TORCH AND GIVE IT TO REB”) — yet more tedious typing.

And the parser, that focal point of the whole interface, is at least as exasperating as the mainline Telarium parser. Like Byron Preiss Video Productions and many others at this time, Ultrasoft chose to take a profoundly misguided approach to this most critical piece of their engine. As described in an article in Softline magazine:

Ultrasoft’s parser is based on concepts in artificial intelligence. In any given message, it eliminates words that don’t make sense and attempts to make sense out of words that are relevant to the situation. This method frees the player from the verb-noun format of the typical adventure’s input.

In other words, the parser pretends to be smarter than it is by simply throwing out anything it doesn’t understand and doing what it can with the rest. This approach may “free the player from the verb-noun format,” but it also guarantees that complex (and often not so complex) inputs will be not just rejected — which combined with a proper error message is at least a form of useful feedback — but misunderstood. Far from making the parser seem smarter, this just makes it seem that much dumber and that much more infuriating. It leads to situations like that in the Byron Preiss games where any input containing the word “LOOK” anywhere within it causes the parser to dump everything else and print a room description. In Shadowkeep, typing “NAOMI CAST CURE SPELL ON REB” leads her to cast it away into the ether — that “ON REB” was a bridge too far, and thus ignored. Such a system fails to recognize that at least 95% of the time those extra words are not just stuff the player tacked on for the hell of it (who wants to type more than necessary under any circumstances?) but essential information about what she really wants to do.

To play Shadowkeep is to constantly wrestle with the interface. After playing several hours there are basic tasks I still haven’t figured out how to do — like how to cast a cure spell on someone outside of combat, or how to just get a list of the spells a certain character knows. And, like Ultrasoft’s earlier games, Shadowkeep is slow. Every step in the dungeon seems to take an eternity, and as for more complex action… forget about it. Playing is like wading through molasses with shackled feet.

The rewards for all the parsing pain are relatively slight: a handful of logic- or object-oriented puzzles on each level that can perhaps be a bit more complex than they could be under the Wizardry engine. Needless to say, they aren’t worth the rest of the trouble, making Shadowkeep something of a lowlight in the long, chequered history of adventure/CRPG hybrids. Which is a shame, because Shadowkeep‘s dungeon levels do show evidence of some careful craftsmanship and, as noted above, there are some good, original ideas on display here. Shadowkeep is a perfect example of a potentially worthy game destroyed by horrid interface choices. And I mean that literally: if the game isn’t outright unplayable (some patient souls have apparently played and even enjoyed it), it’s closer than I ever need to come to that adjective.

Ultrasoft was already in the process of fading quietly away by the time of Shadowkeep‘s late 1984 release. They never managed to port the Ultra II engine beyond the Apple II, leaving Shadowkeep without that all-critical Commodore 64 version. Spinnaker toyed with doing the port themselves, even announcing it as coming soon on various occasions, but I see no reason to believe that ever happened. (A Commodore 64 version has been a semi-mythical White Whale in collecting circles for many years now, but, despite some anecdotal claims and remembrances, no one has ever produced an actual working version to my knowledge.) The lack of a Commodore 64 version and the underwhelming nature of the game itself combined to make Shadowkeep the least successful — and, today, rarest — of all the Telarium games. Alan Dean Foster’s book, while no bestseller itself, appears to have sold far more copies on the author’s name recognition and its $3 (as opposed to $35) price tag.

Shadowkeep consists, like most of the Telarium games, of four disk sides. In this case, however, all four sides are written to during play to preserve the current state of the dungeon levels; the player is expected to copy her originals before beginning. To my knowledge none of the copies floating around the Internet are pristine. All contain the residue of previous players in their dungeons. I hope that at some point some enterprising collector will take the time to scan and archive an original set of disks. In the meantime I’m posting for download here the cleanest set I can find, whose first player didn’t seem to get much if at all beyond the first dungeon level. If whilst playing Wizardry or Bard’s Tale you thought to yourself that this game would be even better if it played a lot slower and had a parser, you’ve just found your dream CRPG. All others should consider this one a subject for historical research only.

And on that less than stellar note we’ll be moving on from Telarium for a while. My final reckoning of their first five releases is: two worthy efforts (Dragonworld and Amazon); one could-have-been-a-contender (Fahrenheit 451); and two total misfires (Rendezvous with Rama and Shadowkeep). Not a horrible track record on the whole. We’ll see if they learned any lessons in time for their last few games down the road a ways. But next it’s time to get back to the big boys in the field, and tell the rest of the story of Infocom’s very eventful 1984.

(In addition to the sources listed in my first article on bookware and Telarium, I also referenced for this article a feature on Ultrasoft in the May/June 1983 Softline. And thanks to Alan Dean Foster for taking the time to share his memories of the Shadowkeep project with me.)

I thought we’d look at Amazon a little differently from the other Telarium games because it is, even more so than the others, very much a visual as well as textual experience. I therefore thought I could best convey the experience of playing it with lots and lots of pictures. It also marks one of the last of the classic Apple II “hi-res adventures,” which whatever their other failings had a unique aesthetic of their own. With the Commodore 64 so eclipsing other gaming platforms by 1984 — remember, Amazon with its long gestation period is in a sense much older than its eventual publication date of late that year — we won’t be seeing a whole more of this look. So, let this be our goodbye to one era even as it also represents a prime example of the newer, more sophisticated era of bookware. And anyway things have been kind of dry around here visually for a while now. This blog could use some pictures!

Uniquely for the Telarium line, Amazon lets you choose one of three difficulty levels. I’m playing on the highest difficulty of “Expedition Leader” here, which gives the most to see but is also pretty brutal; death lurks literally everywhere, and comes often (usually?) with no warning whatsoever.

Shay Addams referred to Amazon as an “interactive movie” in his Questbusters review, one of the earlier applications of that term to a computer game. And indeed, the opening sequence is very cinematic, and suitably dramatic. After tuning a receiver to catch the satellite transmission, we watch as the camera pans around the smoking, demolished remnants of the previous Amazon expedition’s campground. It ends with a shot of a member of the cannibal tribe that replaces the killer gorillas of the novel as the architects of all this destruction.

Replacing Amy the signing gorilla is Paco the talking parrot, shown here in this lovely illustration by David Durand. I find him kind of hilarious, but I’m not entirely sure if he was written that way intentionally or not; Crichton, whatever his other strengths, isn’t normally what you’d call a funny writer. Paco at first appears to be a classic adventure-game sidekick/hint system, giving advice constantly throughout the game. In a departure from the norm, however, his advice is, at least on Expedition Leader level, disastrously misguided at least 50% of the time, getting you killed or stranded in all sorts of creative ways. Crichton often stated that he wanted to make a more believable, realistic adventure game. In that spirit, I suppose taking everything said by a talking parrot as gospel might not get you very far in the real world. But then if we’re debating realism we have to also recognize that Paco is basically a cartoon character, even more so than Amy the ridiculously intelligent, loyal, and empathetic gorilla of the novel. Foghorn Leghorn’s got nothing on this guy.

Like in the book, we can use our field computer to link up with NSRT headquarters for regular updates. The above shows the situation just after we’ve parachuted with Paco into the Amazon rain forest. Looks like other than the cannibals and the rampaging government troops and that volcano that’s about to erupt there’s nothing to worry about.

Have I mentioned that it’s easy to die at Expedition Leader level? One wrong move leads to one of a rogue’s gallery of gleefully described death scenes to rival one of the Phoenix games.

Crichton’s opinion of Peru’s military seems to be no higher than was his opinion of Zaire’s in the novel.

In another strikingly cinematic scene, we use our handy night-vision goggles and an assist from Paco to sneak away from the troops who captured us.

With the “corrupt government troops” behind us, we now get to deal with the Kemani tribesman. Luckily, they like cigarettes and we happen to have a pack.

We climb the volcanic Mount Macuma, which separates us from our objective and will soon give us problems in another way.

NSRT airlifts some desperately needed supplies to us. (Why do I want to hear Paco saying “De plane! De plane!” when I see this screenshot?)

Crichton may have been trying to make a new type of adventure game, but he couldn’t resist including a very old-school maze which we have to navigate to reach the airdropped supplies. This is actually the only part of the game which requires mapping. Normally it’s much more interested in forward plot momentum than the details of geography.

Getting across the river is even more difficult than was getting over the mountain. Once again our night-vision goggles come in handy.

Next morning we find that mischivious monkeys have stolen our supplies. A merry chase follows, implemented as one of Amazon‘s two action games. These were not likely to make arcade owners nervous, but at least they aren’t embarrassingly bad like the action games in Telarium’s other titles. They’re actually kind of engaging in their way; a nice change of pace. Indeed, Amazon‘s way of constantly throwing different stuff at you is one of the most impressive things about it. The screen is constantly changing. “Whatever works for this part of the story” seems to have been Crichton’s philosophy.

One more obstacle to cross, and we come to the outskirts of the lost city of Chak. It doesn’t exactly look welcoming.

The cannibals attack that night and, in increasing numbers, every night we remain in Chak. The attack is presented as another action game, this time a Space Invaders-like affair which, while not as original or entertaining as the monkey chase, is at least competently executed.

We have about five days in Chak before the volcano erupts. If that sounds generous, know that it’s really not; time passes devilishly quickly. Our main objective is to find the secret staircase that will take us to the endgame.

The endgame requires us to open a series of doors in the correct order using clues found onscreen — one of the few classically adventure-gamey puzzles you’ll find in Amazon. The correct sequence for the above, for example, is 1-3-2. I assume this is because there are 9 marks on the first door, 13 on the second, and 11 on the third. At any rate my first instinct was to arrange them in numerical sequence, and it worked.

The final sequence is, to say the least, a bit more tricky. Now we have nine doors to contend with. This puzzle, which appears only at Expedition Leader level, stumped me entirely and forced me to a walkthrough. If you can solve it, or even just give the methodology for solving it given the correct answer, I’d love to hear about it. To see the answer, highlight the empty space that follows: 3-4-8-1-5-9-2-6-7.

Get past the last of the doors and we come to enough emeralds to warm any greedy adventurer’s heart. And after that, to quote Neal Stephenson, “It’s just a chase scene,” as we rush to get away from the erupting volcano.

Crichton wouldn’t return to computer games until some fifteen years after Amazon. It’s not hard to understand why. Even if Amazon sold 100,000 copies, his earning from it would have been a drop in the bucket compared to what he earned from his books and movie licenses. Yet Amazon is good enough that it makes me wish he had done more work in interactive mediums.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its problems. The parser is no better than you might expect from such a one-off effort; on at least one or two occasions I knew exactly what to do but had to turn to the walkthrough to figure out how to say it to the game. And the story logic often has little to do with real-world logic. If you don’t do everything just right in the opening stages of the game, for instance, your flight to Peru will get hijacked and you’ll end up dead after the game toys with you a bit — this despite there being no logical reason why your previous failings should have led to your flight getting hijacked.

Still, Amazon is a unique experience, as I hope the pictures above convey. Especially if played on one of the less masochistic levels, it’s a fast-moving rush of a game that’s constantly throwing something new and interesting at you. And it really is relentlessly cinematic, replete with stylish little touches. Even when it’s working with just text, words often stutter onto the screen in clumps to mimic conversation, or are pecked out character by character when they’re coming through your satellite computer hookup. There’s a sense that things could go in any direction, that anything could be asked of you next, rules of computer-game genres be damned. If that sounds appealing, by all means download it, fire up your Apple II emulator, and give it a go.

There are new ways of presenting information other than the traditional ways in which the reader or viewer is required to be passive. A few years ago, I realized that I didn’t know about these things, and that I’d better find out about them. The only way I could learn was to actually go and do one. So I said, “Well, I’ll just make a game and then I’ll learn.” And I certainly did.

— Michael Crichton, 1984

Anyone who had been reading Michael Crichton’s novels prior to the founding of the Telarium brand had to know of his interest in computers. The plot of 1972’s The Terminal Man, of a man who has a computer implanted in his brain, is the sort of thing that would become commonplace in science fiction only with the rise of cyberpunk more than a decade later. And of course computers are also all over 1980’s Congo; indeed, they’re the only reason the heroes are out there in the jungle in the first place. Crichton’s personal history with computers also stretches back surprisingly far. Always an inveterate gadget freak, he bought his first computer-like machine in the form of an Olivetti word processor almost as soon as his earnings from his first hit novel, The Andromeda Strain, made it possible. He wrote his books for years on the Olivetti. When the trinity of 1977 arrived, he quickly jumped aboard the PC revolution with an Apple II, first of a stable that within a few years would also include Commodores, Radio Shacks, and IBMs.

Never shy about sharing his interests in print, Crichton became a semi-regular contributor to Creative Computing magazine, who were thrilled to have a byline of his prominence under any terms. Thus they gave him free rein to opine in the abstract:

I would argue that it [computer technology] is a force of human evolution, opening new possibilities for our minds, simultaneously freeing us from drudgery while presenting us with a parody of our own rational sides. Computers actually show us both the benefits and the limits of rationality with wonderful precision. What could be more rational than that pedantic little box that keeps saying SYNTAX ERROR over and over? And what does our frustration suggest to us, in terms of other things to do and other ways to be?

But Crichton was more than the mere dabbler that poeticisms like the above might suggest. He took the time to learn how to program his toys, publishing fairly intricate program listings in BASIC for applications such as casting the I Ching (a byproduct of his seldom remarked interest in mysticism; see his nonfiction memoir Travels, which might just be the most interesting thing he ever wrote); identifying users based on their typing characteristics (inspired by his recent short story “Mousetrap”); and creating onscreen art mirroring that of abstract painter Josef Albers (Crichton’s interest in and patronship of the visual arts also tends to go unremarked). In 1983 he published the book Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers, a breezy introduction for the layman which nevertheless shared some real wisdom on topics such as the absurdity of the drive for “computer literacy” which insisted that every schoolchild in the country needed to know how to program in BASIC to have a prayer of success in later life. It also offered a spirited defense of computer as tools for entertainment and creativity as well as business and other practical matters.

Which isn’t to say that he didn’t find plenty of such practical applications for his computers. During this part of his life Crichton was immersed in planning for a movie called Runaway, which was to star Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons of Magnum P.I. and Kiss fame respectively. He hoped it would be one of the major blockbusters of 1984, although it would ultimately be overshadowed by a glut of other high-profile science-fiction films that year (The Terminator, Star Trek III, 2010). He hired a team to create a financial-modeling packaging which he claimed would allow a prospective filmmaker to input a bunch of parameters and have a shooting budget for any movie in “about a minute.” It was soon circulating amongst his peers in Hollywood.

Thus when the folks at Telarium started thinking about authors who might be interested in licensing their books and maybe even working with them on the resulting adaptations, Crichton was a natural. Seth Godin approached him in late 1983. He returned with extraordinary news: not only was Crichton interested, but he already had a largely completed game for them, based on his most recent novel, Congo.

Crichton had first started thinking he might like to write a game as long as two years before Godin’s inquiry. He’d grown frustrated with the limitations of the adventure games he’d played, limitations which seemed to spring not just from the technology but also from the lack of dramatic chops of their programmers.

I simply didn’t understand the mentality that informed them. It was not until I began programming myself that I realized it was a debugger’s mentality. They could make you sit outside a door until you said exactly the right words. Sometimes you had to say, “I quit,” and then it would let you through.

Well, that’s life in the programming world. It’s not life in any other world. It’s not an accepted dramatic convention in any other arena of entertainment. It’s something you learn to do when you’re trying to make the computer work.

Here’s what I found out early on: you can’t have extremely varied choices that don’t seem to matter. I can go north, south, east, or west, and who cares? You can only do that for a while, and then if you don’t start to have an expectation of what will happen, you’ll stop playing the game. You’d better get right going and you’d better start to have something happen.

If I play a game for a half-hour and it doesn’t make any sense to me, I’ll just quit and never go back. Say I’m locked in this house and I don’t know what the point of the house is and why I can’t get out and there’s no sort of hint to me about the mentality that would assist me in getting out — I don’t know. I could say “Shazam!” or I could burn the house down or — give me a break. I just stop.

Crichton started to sketch out his own adventure game based on Congo, whose simple quest plot structure made it a relatively good choice for conversion to the new format. Realizing that his programming skills weren’t up to the task of implementing his ideas, he hired programmer Stephen Warady to write the game in Apple II assembly language. The little team was eventually completed by David Durand, an artist who normally worked in film graphics. The game as it evolved was as much a mixed-media experience as text adventure, incorporating illustrations, simple action games, and other occasional graphical interludes that almost qualify as cut scenes, perfectly befitting this most cinematic of writers (and, not incidentally, making the game a perfect match with Telarium’s other games once they finally came calling). Crichton would sometimes program these sequences himself in BASIC, then turn them over to Warady to redo in much faster assembly language. Given Crichton’s other commitments, work on Congo the game proceeded in fits and starts for some eighteen months. They were just getting to the point of thinking about a publisher when Godin arrived to relieve them of that stress.

When Spinnaker started their due diligence on the deal, however, a huge problem quickly presented itself: Crichton, as was typical for him by this time, had already sold the media rights to Congo to Hollywood. (After they languished there for many years, the success of the Jurassic Park film would finally prompt Paramount Pictures to pick them up and make a Congo movie at last in 1995. Opinions are divided over whether that movie was just bad or so cosmically bad that it became good again.) Those rights unfortunately included all adaptations, including computer games, something the usually business-savvy Crichton had totally failed to realize. Spinnaker may have been a big wheel in home computers, but they didn’t have much clout in Hollywood. So, they came up with another solution: they excised the specifics of the novel from the game, leaving just the plot framework. The Congo became the Amazon; Amy the signing gorilla became Paco the talking parrot; Earth Resources Technology Services became National Satellite Resources Technology; a diamond mine became an emerald mine; African cannibals and roving, massacring army troops became South American cannibals and roving, massacring army troops. It may not have said much for Crichton and Spinnaker’s appreciation for cultural diversity, but it solved their legal problems.

Amazon was written for the Apple II in native assembly language. Spinnaker, however, took advantage of the rare luxury of time — the game was in an almost completed state when Crichton signed in late 1983, fully one year before the Telarium line’s launch — to turn it over to Byron Preiss Video Productions to make a version in SAL for the all-important Commodore 64 platform. The result wasn’t quite as nice an experience as the original, but it was acceptable. And it was certainly a wise move: Amazon became by all indications the most successful of all the Telarium games. Some reports have it selling as many as 100,000 copies, very good numbers for a member of a line whose overall commercial performance was quite disappointing. The majority of those were most likely the Commodore 64 version, if sales patterns for Amazon matched those for the industry as a whole.

I do want to talk about Amazon in more detail; it’s an historically important game thanks if nothing else to Crichton’s involvement and also a very interesting one, with some genuinely new approaches. But we’ll save that discussion for next time. In the meantime, feel free to download the Apple II version from here if you’d like to get a head start. Note that disk 3 is the boot disk.

(All of the references I listed in my first article on bookware still apply. Useful interviews with Crichton appeared in the February 1985 Creative Computing and February 1985 Compute!. Other articles and programs by Crichton appeared in Creative Computing‘s March 1983, June 1984, and November 1984 issues.)